Wednesday, 3 April 2013

Twentieth-century Gaelic literature: Iain Crichton Smith

SONGS AND TALES FOR A NEW CEILIDH:

THE GAELIC WRITINGS OF IAIN CRICHTON SMITH

Donald E. Meek

It gives me much pleasure to
be present at this conference in memory of a a distinguished writer who was
also my teacher, when I was a pupil in Oban High School in 1965-67.Iain Smith's inimitable style remains vividly
in my mind - the unending flow of humour, the many puns, the fits of helpless
laughter as the teacher wrapped himself round the wastepaper basket and enjoyed
his own jokes at least as much as his pupils did.Humour often interrupted - or should I say,
enhanced? - the day's classes, but the fact that our teacher was also one of
Scotland's leading literary figures was not allowed to interfere with regular
teaching; the syllabus took precedence over the artist, the curriculum was more
important than the poet.Only now and
again, and in the strictest confidence, would Mr Smith (as he then was) reveal
that he was a writer.Once that
confidence was established, the more trusted pupils might be given weekend
reading, as I was on several occasions, consisting of wadges of transparent
copy paper, blasted through with heavy typewriter bombardment, which contained
drafts of poems, short stories and unpublished novels, in both Gaelic and
English.Here was creativity indeed, and
a sense of cameraderie in the great art of original composition.Trusted pupils were permitted to assess their
teacher's homework.

Iain Smith valued the
friendship and companionship of creative minds, of both pupils and poets.On certain weekends, as he would disclose
later, he would go to Edinburgh to enjoy the company of fellow poets, such as
MacDiarmid, MacCaig, MacLean and Brown.It was from Iain that I first learned of these mighty men of modern
Scottish verse.His visits to the
literary pubs of the capital were his intellectual ceilidh time, when he and
his friends regaled one another with creative gossip and new compositions.On these occasions, Iain was in the midst of
his creative soul-friends, and his 'ceilidhs' with them were one of his
personal delights.

Iain also frequented other,
more traditional forms of ceilidh in Oban itself, and brought Monday-morning
reports of these.At the emotional
level, he took great pleasure in Gaelic songs, and revelled particularly in the
work of Duncan Ban MacIntyre.The annual
Donnchadh Ban ceilidh was one of his special delights.However, he was also fairly critical of much
of the traditional output of Gaelic verse.After an English class, if there was time to speak, he would sometimes
talk about poets such as the popular nineteenth-century song-writer, Neil
MacLeod, whose verse he did not appreciate.He found MacLeod, as I remember, particularly shallow and unsatisfying;
MacLeod composed some of the best known songs in Gaelic, like 'An Gleann san
robh mi Og'.As I can now appreciate
much more clearly, Iain had a great dislike of romanticism, and of false
facades, whether in poetry, people or place (and I will develop that later as
the main theme of my talk).The Gaelic
poets whom he admired were those whom he considered to have broken through to
the reality of human existence.Thus,
among the eighteenth-century poets, he liked Donnchadh Ban, but he also valued
Rob Donn MacKay, and translated major poems by both of these poets into
English.Of the nineteenth-century
poets, he enjoyed the work of Mary MacPherson, and often enthused about her
song 'Nuair bha mi og'.The
twentieth-century poets were, however, his special friends - Sorley MacLean,
Derick Thomson and Donald MacAulay.

When it came to Gaelic prose,
as distinct from Gaelic poetry, Iain was much more reticent, and when pushed
into a corner he had little to say of a complementary nature.I cannot remember him ever enthusing about a
Gaelic prose writer.In reviews in the
periodical, Gairm, however, he would occasionally let his feelings show. I
gained the impression that Gaelic prose was a big disappointment to him.He particularly disliked the school texts
which he had to read as a boy; he found little to admire or to enjoy in the
ponderous prose which was often presented in large black print in Blackie's
Gaelic readers.For him, the style and
language took precedence all too often over the thought, and that was
unacceptable in his eyes.As his reviews
make clear, Gaelic prose ought to be concise, clear and simple in style, and it
ought to carry an intellectually satisfying, and enjoyable, message.His own Gaelic short stories were constructed
with precisely those aims; no Gaelic prose writer ever wrote such simple and
unadorned prose as Iain Crichton Smith, and few have ever probed the dilemmas
of human existence with such a sharp eye.Despite the intellectual perspective, however, he was also one of the
first writers to appreciate the need for good, attractive children's writing in
Gaelic, with themes and styles that would appeal to children.(I will speak later about his children's
fantasy novel, Iain am-measg nan Reultan.)
In his prose, the sparseness, the bareness of the style and the sharply
analytical focus, the emphasis on the mind rather than the body, the enjoyment
of the metaphysical rather than the physical, were (I am sure) intended as a
deliberate challenge to traditional Gaelic writing.There is a similar sparseness in the style of
his Gaelic poetry, compared with traditional models; it is not the complexity
of the metre or the profusion of language typical of the traditional poets that
we find in Iain's verse.Rather, it is
a rejection of metre and style of that kind.Language for language's sake (that is to say, rhetoric), or metre for
metre's sake (that is to say, verse), was not Iain's primary concern, though he
loved to play with language, and had a pun-gent wit; language was a vehicle for
the expression of thought, and so too, insofar as it was relevant, was metre.

Thus the traditional Gael,
reared in the old ceilidh house or familiar with its conventions, and used to
richness of language as a primary constituent of 'good' Gaelic literature,
would probably find Iain's output 'bare', if not 'barren', devoid of aesthetic
appeal, difficult to enjoy and hard to understand, and he or she would probably
brand it as 'un-Gaelic'.Again, some of
the themes that he pursued - his concern with the mind, with philosophy, with
psychology, with the meaning of existence - would not have been attractive to
the average man or woman on the croft.The conclusion of the average Gael often was that 'his poetry is beyond
me'.My own feeling is that Iain's work
has yet to be fully appreciated.As time
moves on, it will appeal most naturally to 'new Gaels'; to the pupils who have
gone through the Gaelic-medium units, and whose worldview has not been shaped
by the croft or the creel; to those adults who have learned the language and
identify with a non-Gaelic culture in the first instance; and to those who have
moved from the traditional concerns of the Gaelic community to a more global
view of literature.

Here we encounter something
of a conflict - one of many conflicts, I would say - at the heart of Iain
Smith's Gaelic work. On the one hand, Iain was writing for the Gaelic
community, and he belonged to that community; but, on the other hand, he was
coining new literary styles, and subverting some of the most important
stylistic hallmarks of the traditional Gaelic community.He was concerned to provide new, original
approaches to literature, whereas the conventional Gaelic community admired
imitation of earlier models, or worked in well worn tracks. His connections
with the Gaelic world remained strong, but he was not wholly part of that
world; he was 'of that world, but not in it' (if I may reconstruct a well-known
phrase). His work includes satire as well as sympathy, powerful defences of the
Gael and Gaelic, as well as merciless attacks on the Gael's 'sacred cows',
including the church.He was, by any
standards, a complex individual.

The complex relationship
between Iain Smith and the Gaelic world finds one of its symbolic centres, so
to speak, in his frequent allusions to the ceilidh - and I want to make that my
theme in this talk.In Iain's work, both
in his critical writings and his creative pieces, the ceilidh symbolises
aspects of the traditional Gaelic world. Iain had something of a love-hate
relationship with the ceilidh.On the
one hand, he enjoyed ceilidhs hugely, but on the other he often disliked them;
he was, as he said, a 'double man', living with two different cultures and
struggling to accommodate them.His
views of the ceilidh show his bi-valency, so to speak.The gregarious side of him longed for the
companionship and the friendship of the ceilidh, but intellectually he rejected
much of ceilidh culture.His enjoyment,
or lack of it, depended on what was in the ceilidh, and what kind of ceilidh it
was.

If you read his splendid
essay, 'Real People in a Real Place', you will find that Iain has a lot to say
about ceilidhs, and distinguishes two types.He draws a distinction between the 'old ceilidh' of the traditional
Gaelic community - the one that Derick Thomson considered to have been destroyed
by the evangelical Calvinism of Lewis - and the 'new ceilidh' of exiles in the
cities.With the traditional sort of
ceilidh he could empathise; as he saw it, it was a cohesive act of the
community, and had a mix of songs and tales which came from the community
itself.His most dismissive comments
were, however, reserved for the exiles' ceilidh.He regarded the city ceilidhs, which often
gave precedence to romantic songs, as acts of self-delusion.This is what he says (p. 23):

'The new ceilidh has now
become a concert, with "stars" in kilts twinkling from platforms in
great halls in Edinburgh or Glasgow.The
songs have become nostalgic exercises, a method of freezing time, of stopping
the real traffic of Sauchiehall Street, a magic evocation of a lost island in
the middle of the city.The traditional
ceilidh which was held in the village in the village ceilidh house was a
celebration of the happenings of the village, it was alive, it was a diary and
a repeated record.The ceilidh as it is
now practised is a treacherous weakening of the present, a memorial, a
tombstone on what has once been, pipes playing in a graveyard.'

To understand the prominence
of the 'new ceilidh' in Iain's work, we have to bear in mind that he himself
was an 'exile', in the sense that he lived and worked away from Lewis.That created tensions for him.He was acutely aware that the state of exile
could produce misleading views of the original homeland, and that these could
be recycled by the folk at home.Nostalgia of this kind could also divert people from the real tasks
around them.Just occasionally, however,
I wonder if Iain Smith himself was not being a trifle romantic in his
perception of the traditional ceilidh.For one thing, this would have been the very place where the traditional
tales about the Gaelic heroes - Fionn, Cu Chulainn, Conall Gulban and the rest
of them - would have been recited with vigour and gusto, with their many prolix
'runs' and rich vocabulary.Here too we
would have found Gaelic poetry and song which would have reinforced traditional
models.Iain's prose and verse challenge
and ultimately reject these models.Consequently, his concept of the 'new ceilidh' which he himself wanted
is at once very different from that of both the exile and the native.His preferred 'new ceilidh' - the target
audience of his own songs and tales, rather than the exile's 'new ceilidh' - is
a ceilidh of the mind, where intellectual freedom, rather than slavish
imitation of existing models, is practised.It is devoid of romanticism, and encourages the search for reality
rather than a retreat into self-delusion.It is global rather than insular in its worldview.

Iain uses various devices,
including satire, to show the irrelevance of the exile's ceilidh to the contemporary
world.Despite the general view of him
as a relentless intellectual, Iain had the ability to write for young people,
and did so in a couple of books, one of which is his children's fantasy, Iain am-measg nan Reultan. In this
story, two youngsters, Iain and Rita, arrive in Mars, in the company of some
very untraditional Gaelic heroes, Dan Dare and Desperate Dan - the comic
characters of Iain's boyhood and mine.When they reach Mars, they are first taken to a 'Mod', which has
contextualised itself in the Red Planet, and is going full swing when they
enter.For Iain Smith, the Mod is an
extension of the exile's pointless ceilidh, and the Mars Mod is a confused
experience (p. 40):

They went in quietly and they sat at the back.There was a man with a red kilt and a red face
singing a song.

The name of the song was, 'Come to Mars'.These were its first lines:

'O come, my sweetheart, to the land of the planets

You will get dambaddy and górav...'

'Dambaddy' is a kind of food, and 'górav' is a kind of
wine.

There were three men sitting writing.

The old woman said, 'They are giving him marks.'The paper on which they were writing was
red, and the pen was red too.The old
woman said, 'We left the Earth many years ago, but as you see we still keep up
the old customs.On Hogmanay we wil have
Andy Stewart also but he takes a lot of money for his trip.'

When the song was finished the chairman said: 'I am
sorry that Norman has not come yet.We
were expecting him from the planet Venus but something happened to his
spaceship.However, it wil not be long
until he arrives.'

The song which is being sung,
'Thugainn do Mhars', is a parody ofpopular Gaelic songs in which the poets invite their sweethearts to
visit their native islands. The first line echoes 'Tiugainn, a leannain, do Scalpaidh
na Hearadh', while the second imitates the catalogue of 'delights' which the
sweetheart will find in the island.The
Gaelic of Mars has evidently produced new words, which, when translated by the
author, turn out to be terms for food and drink.The second item 'gorav' seems to echo the
Gaelic adjective, 'gòrach' ('foolish').This clever little joke makes the point that intellectual satisfaction
cannot to be found in such songs; they descend too easily into meaningless,
formulaic catalogues, imitative of one another and easily carted around the
Gaelic solar system, with its stars and moonshine.Iain also takes a swipe at Scottish
entertainment more generally, and gently satirises some well known Scottish entertainers:
Andy Stewart represents the couthy but colossally expensive variety, while
Norman (Who?) represents the funny but hugely unpredictable variety. Andy's
expenses are astronomical, while Norman's non-appearance in Mars is explained
by a spaceship accident.

The hò-rò-gheallaidh in Mars is the reductio
ad absurdum of the exile's 'new ceilidh', but what of the ingredients of
Iain Smith's own 'new ceilidh'?If Iain
were organising a ceilidh, what songs would he put on the programme?My own intuition is that he would, in fact,
attempt to balance old and new, and that he would provide a set of new songs to
be sung alongside the old, and thus provide some intellectual fibre.His concept of the songs which might be
appropriate in his 'new ceilidh' is put on display in his collection, Biobuill is Sanasan-reice ('Bibles and
Advertisements').Here he has an
important sequence entitled 'Ochd Orain airson Ceilidh Uir' ('Eight Songs for a
New Ceilidh'), which has been anthologised in other collections.The last poem in the sequence - Poem 8 - takes
the 'invitation formula' that he has satirised in the context of Mars (pp.
21-22).In this song the sweetheart is
invited to visit, not some Hebridean island such as Uist or Lewis, but Japan,
where she is to reflect on the destruction wrought by the dropping of the
atomic bomb, which destroys not only people but 'sense'.The traditional 'escapist culture' is here
identified with the ceilidh halls of Glasgow and Edinburgh, and Iain makes the
point that, in the way that they are sung, even the songs of Duncan Ban
MacIntyre are sanitised to some extent, in the interests of 'the lies that make
clouds around our generation'.

The sequence contains other
poems which make essentially the same point, namely that it is not possible for
anyone with an active mind to seal the islands and Gaelic culture off from the
wider world, to retreat irresponsibly into romanticism, and to lock the door on
the atrocities of the twentieth century, including the holocaust.We are in the world of the 'global village'
here, and the 'global village ceilidh'.Indeed, in Poem 3 in the sequence Iain sees himself standing in a
concentration camp, and taking part in the execution of the Jews in a gas
chamber, in which the gas is 'mar cheo Leodhais air creagan fuar'' ('like the
mist of Lewis on cold rocks').Here,
the mist which is so often magical and mystical in Gaelic song(Skye is traditionally 'Eilean a' Cheò', for
example) is being associated with the cold-blooded horror of Hitler's policies
in far-away Germany.Far from obscuring
the past, the mist brings a terrible tragedy closer to home, and the poet
shares in the corporate responsibility for what has happened.

In the light of that
responsibility, and particularly the destruction of war, Iain feels that he has
to set a question mark against commonly accepted aesthetic values, such as
natural beauty, whether in people or in the physical world. External matters
cannot be accepted at face value.He
cannot compose a love-poem to order, so to speak; it has to arise from his own experience;
he has to feel the real agony of love within himself.Traditional Gaelic poets admired the
physical, and described it in detail, whether in terms of the human form or the
shape of the land, its mountains and lochs. Although he is well aware of the
beauty around him, Iain Smith rejects physical sources of inspiration for his
verse, whether these be mountains, stars, an overseas voyage or the cultural
delights of London.He makes this clear
in his 'Eight Songs for a New Ceilidh'.He prefers what he can see and feel inside his own heart; although this
makes for a dangerous and isolated existence, it is by this means
(paradoxically) that he will touch universal themes.The contribution of Lewis to that process of
self-probing and self-analysis has been the very opposite of what the island
has done for the romantic exile, since it has given an unromantic edge to his
poetry, though it has given him an internal musicality: 'but it was the
bareness of Lewis that made the work of my mind like a loom full of the music
of the miracles and greatness of our time'.

It is very evident from this
sequence of poems alone that Iain Smith found music very attractive; he was
pulled inexorably towards the songs of the Gaelic world, including the great
songs of war-time romanticism, such as Domhnall Ruadh Choruna's 'An Eala Bhan'
('The White Swan'), which was his particular favourite.In his volume Biobuill is Sanasan-reice, Gaelic songs have a very prominent
place.He writes his own poetic
commentary on 'An Eala Bhan', for example, in which he sees the swan as the
inevitable symbol of romantic hope and warmth and creativity at a time of
destruction (p. 37).He makes his own
remarkable response to 'beanntan na Hearadh' ('the mountains of Harris').His poem 'Nochdadh ri Beanntan na Hearadh'
(p.25) superimposes on the bare landscape of Harris the modern, 'external'
commercial world of neon lights, eventide homes, cafes, advertisements,
guitars, nylon, and Woolworth's shops. This grotesquely incongruous picture - a
peculiar double exposure in which Oban seems to be have fallen on top of Harris
- makes its own point very forcefully; the islands cannot be isolated from the
'big world out there'.It will come to
them, bringing its own value system, and its own challenges to the mind as well
as the body.The ominous closing lines
of this poem - 'the green that is not the green of the sea swimming on the face
of a sailor' - are a pointer to the distemper which the new world will bring to
the islands.This volume, it may be
noted, was published in 1965, and almost forty years on we can see that Iain's
grimly ironic reworking of a romantic motif had more than a hint of prophecy in
its lines.

This prophetic glimpse of a
changing world in the islands - a world which is no romantic hideaway but one
that is relentlessly connected to the malaises of the modern day - brings me
finally to prose, and to one of the most fascinating of Iain's stories, An t-Aonaran ('The Loner'), published in
1976.It is a novella, or a long short
story, just about the right size for a ceilidh of the traditional style.It seems to me that the plot - the arrival of
a mysterious loner in the village - is probably not original, though an event
of this kind did apparently happen in Bayble; Iain has almost certainly been
inspired by a powerful Gaelic short story called 'Iomhar Mòr', which was
published in An Cabairneach, the
magazine of Comunn na h-Oigridh, in 1950, and was reprinted in an anthology of
Gaelic short stories in 1970.The theme
is, of course, much older than 1950; the arrival of a stranger of some sort - a
Norseman, a fairy visitor from the otherworld, an enemy of the kindred - is a
well known motif in many traditional Gaelic stories that would have been told
and retold in the old-style ceilidh house across the centuries.The heroes of the community were able to take
their stand against him, or do whatever was necessary to honour traditional
values.

The original type of
'stranger' tale was meant to send a shiver through your spine, but Iain is
concerned to send a shiver through your mind.In Iain's extended version, we have no heroes, only anti-heroes.Dougie, one of the first characters we meet
in the book, owns the local shop and is a source of news, but he has been a
soldier in the army, and often speaks of tanks and Fascists, but this has not
prepared him to cope with the challenge in the story.The story is set in Lewis, in a community
which the author knows well, namely Bayble.The trouble begins in a Nissen hut, which has become home to a
mysterious stranger whose intrusion into the community triggers a whole range
of reactions, most of them hostile, to his appearance.The story is told through the eyes and words
of a retired schoolmaster, with whom the author can obviously identify.Not one of the local characters in the story
actually succeeds in conversing with the stranger; he remains a largely unknown
quantity throughout the book, dwelling apart from the rest of the village.He is a drop-out, we assume, and he has left
the rat-race in order to commune with nature.Yet, although he has left one place and fails to enter the life of
another, he has a potent effect on the village.He is a catalyst towards self-examination on the part of the
schoolmaster, who is forced to reflect on his own life, which has been one of
dullness and tedium.His wife, whom he
met as a student in Edinburgh, has died of cancer, and when she went to the
island with her husband, she abandoned some of her earlier skills and
interests, notably her violin playing.The violin, gathering dust and now unused, is a leitmotif in the
novella.The transition to Lewis has
stifled her artistry; the beauty which her husband saw in the sea and moor
killed her innate beauty.

In this way, Iain takes a
highly traditional theme - and old-style ceilidh theme at the heart of Gaelic
creativity across the centuries -and
redirects it in order to explore the meaning of beauty, and ultimately the
meaning of life itself, for that is the main theme of the book.All the main characters, including
pre-eminently the narrator, are shown to be 'loners', divorced from others, and
communicating largely with themselves; their only point in common is their
dislike of the stranger, their blundering attempts to second-guess him and to
understand his motive in coming to the village.They consistently think the worst of him.As they do so, they are affected by the same
existential disease, and become alienated from themselves and from their
callings; even the minister is unable to preach the sermon that he has prepared
for the Sabbath day, and comes to seek the advice of the schoolmaster.Finally, they succeed in driving the stranger
from the village on a trumped-up charge.They have lost their sense of being human, as part of a wider family of
human relations; and they are themselves lost in existential anonymity and
ambiguity.They are all 'loners' looking
for meaning.There is no ceilidh in this
book, no Highland hospitality, no tolerance, no meeting of minds; only
suspicion and failure and a kind of perverted voyeurism, preying on other
people's failings and waiting to see who will 'crack' first in this
tension-ridden place of unfulfilment.It
is as if Iain Smith has written a creative commentary on one of the famous
lines of Murdo MacFarlane, the Melbost Bard, who, when he went to Canada,
complained in his famous Gaelic exile song that 'there was no ceilidh on the
prairie'.There is no ceilidh in
Bayble.Without the ceilidh, as Iain
states in 'Real People in a Real Place', the community becomes a void. An t-Aonaran portrays that void, and
could be read as a plea for real and realistic ceilidhing in a broken
world.The ceilidh has to be put back
into the soul-destroying flatness of the postmodern prairie.

There are many ironies in
this book, many conflicts and contradictions. One is the comment that it makes
on the state of exile.One need not
leave Lewis to be an exile; it is possible to be exiled from one's real self,
and that is surely part of the message of An
t-Aonaran. All this goes to show that, despite the romantic external image
of the islands, life there - the internal reality - is no different from that
in other parts of the world.The
characters are just as much lost in their existential nightmares as are the people
of London or Edinburgh or Los Angeles.Thus, although An t-Aonaran is
a story set in a village in Lewis, it has a universal application.It takes the lid off Bayble, so to speak, and
but it reveals the bigger Babel within the human condition, the Babel in which
a deep communicative disorder is only just below the surface.Despite their use of language, it is not
possible for these twentieth-century islanders to communicate effectively with
each other or to accommodate another person.It is a frighteningly realistic book - frightening in what it has to say
about leading double lives, about hypocrisy, salaciousness and
noseyparkerism.It is, for better or
worse, about real people in a real island - not romantic people in a romantic
island.

And that sums it up.Iain Smith's Gaelic writings, both prose and
verse (and I have touched on only the merest fraction of these in this paper),
are intended to be relevant to the Gaelic world, but to be a challenge at various
levels - a challenge to make Gaelic styles more flexible, a challenge to dump
romantic dreaming about the islands, a challenge to avoid escapism, a challenge
to 'get real', as we would say today, and to face real issues.Behind the challenges, however, was a deep
concern to take Gaelic literature forward - to pull it out of its concern with
itself, with its own narrow world, and to make the Gaelic writer central to the
wider literary world, rather than 'off the edge of things' in some romantic
cul-de-sac.Nowadays, we talk about the
need to 'normalise' or 'equalise' the Gaelic language by bringing it up to a
par with English in the life of the Scottish nation.Iain Smith's aim from the very outset was, I
believe, the 'normalisation' and 'equalisation' of Gaelic literature in terms
of the wider literary world.The
ceilidh, in his view, had to be taken out of the hands of the exiles, out of
the music halls of Edinburgh and Glasgow, and repatriated to the Highlands and
Islands -repatriated, that is, among
real people in a real place, who would sing real songs and tell real
tales.But it had also to be repatriated
intellectually and chronologically.It
had to deal with the here and now, and not merely with the dead and gone.It had to be able to function
cross-culturally, and its best pieces had to be able to stand on both sides of
the linguistic frontier separating Gaelic and English.

In approaching Gaelic
literature in this way, and by providing what I have called 'songs and tales
for a new ceilidh', Iain Crichton Smith was an undoubted pioneer, unique in
many respects.His ability to compose
prose and verse on similar themes in Gaelic and English, and his desire to use
both languages, set him apart from his contemporaries.In his hands, the Gaelic ceilidh became
multicultural, and Gaelic literature was dragged singing into the global
ceilidh house.